WILLIAM GREEN AND THE LIMITS OF CHRISTIAN IDEALISM: THE AFL YEARS, 1924-1952

Were it not for the fact that most labor historians choose to ignore William Green altogether, Green would be the most hated labor leader in American history. Green is usually portrayed as a bumbling incompetent, ignorant and vain, the cheerful servant of selfish craft union leaders, and the person most responsible for the split in organized labor in 1935. This study attempts to go beyond the myth and address Green on his own terms--as a champion of religiously inspired cooperation between labor and capital.;During Green's tenure as AFL president (1924-1952), as industrial relations became increasingly complex and depersonalized and as society became more secular, the ideal of Christian cooperation waned. Yet Green was so strongly wedded to those values that he proved incapable of abandoning them even after years of failure. His became an increasingly estranged and isolated voice for Christian fellowship in industrial relations. Under his guidance the evangelical-labor tradition, while still upholding the virtue and humanity of labor, became a hindrance to working-class organization, a handmaiden to craft unionists, and a contributor to the division of the labor movement.;Green's impotency as a labor leader came not from personal weakness or lack of effort. He was above all a decent, honorable, and even courageous man who recoiled at economic injustice and labored unsparingly to bring all workers into the union fold. His career reminds us that moral idealism in itself is a weak tool for the advancement of the working class.;Green was among the last heirs of a strain of labor thought that can be traced back into the nineteenth century. Religious idealism had been a major component of the Knights of Labor ideology in the 1870s and 1880s, and Green's own union, the United Mine Workers, was particularly suffused with social gospel thought in its early years. As Green matured, he was only one of many trade union officials who embraced the ideal of Christian cooperation between all parties to the production process.